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Clive Sinclair's last computer creation was manufactured by his own company Cambridge Computer. It's a Z80 (3.2768 MHz) based very slim and handy laptop, has a LCD display with 6 rows and 80 columns (native resolution is 640x64 pixels), and at least 32KB RAM.
You can use additional cards to extend your storage up to 1 MByte RAM / ROM.
BBC Basic was integrated as a programming language.
Unfortunately this beautiful beast not really had a commercial success, one reason was the proprietary card format, also almost no other vendor developed software for it.

It's still a hot collector item:

For more information, take a look at http://www.worldofspectrum.org/z88forever/ .
You will see, there are not too much sites / pages about the Z88.
At sourceforge, a development environment and a virtual machine can be found.
http://www.algonet.se/~dennisgr/z88.htm has a development kit named Z88DK, which is usable not only to create Z88 programs.
Rakewell still produces innovative hardware expansions.You can even buy a Z88 still there !

Not very spectacular, but that's still a good news for me.
A very smart alternative for the build in BASIC 2.0, that's COMAL80.

It's working without any special procedure... just insert cartridge and start the C64:

It's an almost dead programming language, but if you have only the choice between BASIC, COMAL and Assembler, it's worth a try. COMAL80 was a mixture between BASIC and PASCAL, but feels a bit more like BASIC than PASCAL.

For the C64, there is another comparison to BASIC 2.0 here: LINK

If you're curious about COMAL, try the related link below ;-)

Very interesting:

There is not only the "KryoFlux" which is designed to "preserve" old disk formats.
Unfortunately there is still no possibility for all these with KryoFlux read disk images to write it back to the floppy disk...

There is also HxC Floppy Emulator to the rescue !
It's a small board with a PIC18F462, uses a SD card as a mass storage, and can be connected through an usual floppy drive cable (34 pin).
So the old machine can use this board like a normal (mechanical) floppy drive.
A picture of this miracle:


Also, they have something similar to the KryoFlux:
A small board with an Altera MAX CPLD EPM7128S, which in fact is able to emulate the floppy drive with the appropriate "firmware". This device can only read (so far).
This is what it looks like:

http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/
This device is connected - very user friendly - with the help of USB.

Also, there is another (ready made) device available, but very expensive:
See for more infos at http://www.floppy-emulator.de/

100 years of IBM - that's worth to mention.

Without IBM, many inventions were missing, you can see a short overview at Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jtNUGgmd4
You can also see a longer film about IBMs last 100 years here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrhDaAmn5Uw

There is also a famous TV spot shown in the Eighties, do you still remember their own version of Charlie Chaplin ?


It started all with two companies:
C-T-R Computer Tabulating Recording Company
and
Powers Accounting Machine Co.
in 1911.
Interesting, the company "IBM" (International Business Machines) was founded 13 years later, in 1924.

I issued an entry named "Looking for a real Fortran-66 compatible PC compiler ..." in four newsgroups:

https://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.cpm/browse_thread/thread/6004b19ad544d124 (comp.os.cpm)
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.folk ... 4eed64d776 (alt.folklore.computers)
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.com ... 62d3df55c1 (comp.compilers)
http://groups.google.com/group/de.alt.f ... c2d5?hl=de (de.alt.folklore.computer)

So far, I got over 100 answers (whow!).

So I extended my Fortran page meanwhile also a bit ;-)
See also http://www.z80.eu/for-compiler.html ...